Deux nouveaux papiers! (Two new papers!)

We have two new papers out in the past couple weeks! And better yet, they are the first first-author papers for both Mahaut Sorlin and Laura Kouyoumdjian, who put a great deal of their time, energy, and lives into Project PODARCIS in the past couple years. A huge congratulations to everyone involved!

First, in the most recent issue of Herpetological Review we have a natural history note detailing our observations of tail bifurcation in Podarcis muralis. While this is not an extremely unusual observation, there is little in the literature about this phenomena. In over 1500 field captures in recent years from our work and from the ECTOPYR team, only 3 individuals had bifurcated tails (less than 0.2%). Mahaut lead the writing of this paper, which includes a long list of co-authors involved with fieldwork: Fabien, Antonio, Laura, and Elodie Darnet (who introduced me to fieldwork in the Pyrenees). The full-text of the article is posted here on ResearchGate.

Example of one of our lizards with a bifurcated tail.

Second, our manuscript detailing our 2018 experiment with gravid females and their offspring has been accepted in the Journal of Experimental Biology (one of my favorites). We are thrilled to see this paper out. This was probably the most labor-intensive and challenging experiment to date in my career: Laura and I started planning the experiment in February, collected lizards in April, then conducted measures on moms and embryos until August. At one point, we had gravid females and eggs incubating in Moulis and La Mongie  and also eggs up at Pic du Midi...then the eggs started hatching and we had baby lizards in all three locations as well! Despite these challenges, it was great fun and I’m very proud to see our work published. This was a real team effort: Laura, Fabien, Jérémie and I conducted the experiment, Antonio measured the developmental stage of the embryos at the time the eggs were laid, and we happily collaborated with Andréaz Dupoué to measure reactive oxygen metabolites in our blood samples. The pre-print (and soon the final version) are available here.

Go Team PODARCIS!